Teenage daughter India (Mia Wasikowska) pulls further into her sullen shell. She becomes even more of a loner at school, and loses herself in memories of her newly deceased dad (Dermot Mulroney) and the heightened sense of the outdoors that he taught her to love.

Then Dad's brother (Matthew Goode) shows up, all sympathy and smiles. He consoles Evelyn. What does he want from India?

“To be friends.”

She falls under his spell, and his protection.

It's a pity she's too young to have seen Hitchcock's “Shadow of a Doubt.” The adoring niece in that one soon realized that her Uncle Charlie was not what he seemed. Is India on her guard, or does she see a new mentor?

The Hollywood debut of Korean filmmaker Chan-wook Park (“Oldboy”) is a vivid, short exercise in tone, a movie lacking shocks and huge surprises, but one that makes up for that by creeping us out, from start to finish. It's a film of extreme close-ups of a blister being popped, of fear for characters who pop into the frame, ready to solve Charlie's mystery (only to never have the chance) – of a Daddy Longlegs spider's slow progress through India's field of vision.

Kidman manages a lovely hopelessness here. She's lost, and the one person she should be able to cling to has nothing to do with her. Wasikowska's exquisitely expressionless reaction to what transpires makes us question her motives, her morality.

The plummy-voiced Goode has a disarming surface charm, something Park and screenwriters Wentworth Miller and Erin Cressida Wilson undercut by giving away his menace early on. And Park's showy technique doesn't wholly gloss over this lack of mystery.

But while the director is no Hitchcock – not yet, anyway – the modest chills of “Stoker” do suggest he's learned from him and could someday be his own “Master of Suspense.”

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